The following is a blog entry composed by a student in my American Lit. survey after having read "Parker's Back":

“I’m a kitchen sink,You don’t know what that means Because a kitchen sink to you Is not a kitchen sink to me, OK friend?” -Twenty One Pilots “Kitchen Sink” My favorite music artists are the ones that write songs that I have no idea what they are about. At first glance, this song makes no sense. However, I love this song, because even though I do not know exactly what it means, I know it means something. This song, to me, is about experience and how different people have different experiences, and that impacts the way they see the world. To me, it is the mark of a true artist when a song elicits so much emotional connection and feeling from me even without completely outlining the circumstances of that response, whether it be a breakup, a death, etc. “Kitchen Sink” may not actually be about experience, but that what it is about to me, and it has a lot of meaning because of that in my life. The songs that give me freedom to interpret a message are the ones that stick out to me. However, when first listening to them, I may only like the beat or the emotion, though I feel clueless as to the message or meaning, because why would someone write a song about a kitchen sink. That is how I felt after reading Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back” for the first time. Based on the detailed tattoo imagery, the ambiguous field scene, or the unexpected and depressing ending of the short story, I knew that there was a deeper meaning under the surface of the story, I just did not know how to dig it out. Immediately, though, I was impressed with the imagery. For a short story that does not have much action or really that complex of a plot, the imagery sucked me in immediately and made the most mundane of scenes vivid and interesting. After a class discussion that guided me towards the symbolism and meanings in the work, I was shocked at how much detail can be put into one short story. In Flannery O’Connor’s writing, most scenes, characters, and descriptions are all strategically placed to further the message, and in my case, they are virtually undetectable at first read. I understand “Parker’s Back” to be a story of spiritual transformation. Parker goes on a spiritual journey that he does not even know he needs and goes from actively trying to avoid God to accepting God’s pursuit of him and his destiny. He is paralleled to Christ in the short story, and his relationship with his wife is paralleled to the church. To me, it is the mark of an excellent author to be able to create an interesting read at first glance, and on second glance, or maybe fourth or fifth for people like me, a whole new world of meaning and a completely different story. Parker, in my interpretation, reflects more qualities of Jesus throughout the story than his supposedly religious wife does. This was not something that my class necessarily agreed with, but it is the way I read the story and find meaning in it. Just like musical artists, my favorite authors are the ones who write with the freedom to let me discover the meaning, but still can make a solid work of art without the reader understanding the message. Flannery O’Connor’s writing style was a pleasant surprise that followed these criteria, though when it was assigned as homework, I expected it to be dry and difficult to relate to.

Dynamic, static, round, and flat. These are basic formalist terms for character types found in fiction. A dynamic or round character is one who changes over the course of a narrative, while a static or flat one remains the same over the same course. Where the terms originated is for someone far brighter than I am to trace, but certainly they gained a wide use after E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, first published in 1927 but circulating in dozens of reprints up to the present day, including a PDF copy on the web. Not surprisingly for someone trained in writing fiction after World War II, Flannery O’Connor owned a copy: a paperback, according to Arthur Kinney’s study of the books O’Connor owned, printed in 1954 by Harcourt, Brace (111). And while Kinney records no markings in O’Connor’s copy, her readers can safely assume she digested Forster’s character terms, if not from the man himself, then from the theories of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren via the lectures at the University of Iowa’s writing program or one of their textbooks: she owned and marked a copy of their Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students, which Kinney describes as “[p]ossibly used as a text at the State University of Iowa” (102) as well as a copy of the second edition of their Understanding Fiction, which anthologized “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (Kinney 108). But, for most readers, I suspect, what O’Connor read matters less than what she wrote, and it’s there that her mastery of these simple theoretical terms reveals itself. Often, her stories like to focus on a figure determined to maintain his or her static/flat nature whatever the cost. From an early story such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” to a relatively late one such as “A View of the Woods,” O’Connor creates people who would kill rather than change. The Misfit responds to the grandmother’s humanizing touch on the shoulder “as if a snake had bitten him” and sends three bullets flying “through [her] chest” (Collected Works 152). Mark Fortune “don’t want no sass” from his granddaughter about his decision to sell her family’s view of the woods, and to silence the child he “lifted her head and brought it down once hard against the rock that happened to be under it” (545). In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” O’Connor creates a character who seems incapable of development in the mentally challenged Lucynell Crater only to have her learn, Helen Keller-like, to say a single word: bird (177). Then she contrasts Lucynell with Mr. Shiftlet who, with the power to raise an old car from the dead, throws away the opportunity to develop through marriage and ends his tale trying to outrace a “galloping storm” that may prove his undoing (178, 183). In her novels, both Hazel Motes and Francis Marion Tarwater require what O’Connor once called “ever more violent means” (805) to go from being flat to round. And even as she lay dying in a hospital bed (Gooch 363), she experimented with variations in the pattern, penning O.E. Parker’s struggles to come to terms with the change marked by having Jesus tattooed on his back—a development that exchanges his world-wandering ways for a painful existence with Sarah Ruth and her “hardened eyes” (675). Moreover, it’s worth remembering that O’Connor also tended to believe that even her most static characters might prove dynamic beyond the pages of her fiction. She once wrote this about the Misfit: I don’t want to equate the Misfit with the devil. I prefer to think that, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become. (Mystery and Manners 113). It is an astonishingly forgiving picture of what, for many, seems a personification of evil, but it speaks not only to O’Connor’s Christian theology of hope and grace but also to the nature of her delineation of character and interest in writing about the thematic connections to being dynamic/round and static/flat. I rehearse this familiar territory to turn to a question: given her vision of the possibility of character development, why is her fiction so often treated as if it never develops at all? Why does scholarship often read as if O’Connor herself is flat/static? Writing in one of academia’s most impressive literary journals, Mark McGurl makes the case for her lack of development: From her time at Iowa until her death in 1964 at the age of 39, O’Connor never wavered from an aesthetic regime as extreme, in its way, as [Thomas] Wolfe’s late Romantic blathering had been. Reminiscent instead of Wolfe’s fellow Max Perkins protégé´, Ernest Hemingway, who served as the model literary craftsman in the first several decades of the Program Era, she labored obsessively over each line of her prose, revising again and again and again. Unlike Hemingway, whose forms of narration varied over the course of his career, O’Connor employed the same precisely calibrated mode of narration—the “third person limited” form favored by Henry James and promoted by her mentors as the surest path to “impersonality”—in every one of her stories without exception. (531) If McGurl seems extreme, it may well be only because of his oddly O’Connor-esque bluntness. Most scholars are more subtle, simply treating all of O’Connor’s thought as if it exists within the same block of time rather than as something moving on a line through her life. Her essays and letters are too often quoted and applied to her fiction with little regard of their place on a timeline of her writing. When Sally and Robert Fitzgerald prepared her lectures for publication, they felt little compunction about preserving a historical record. They write in the “Foreward” to Mystery and Manners, “In the end we decided to edit the body of the writing as we feel the author herself would now desire, having recourse to the same kind of shuffling as she herself so often practiced” (viii-ix, my emphasis). The implication is that, for the Fitzgeralds, the imperative of getting her occasional prose into print outweighed the need to be able to see the changes taking place in a decade of lecture manuscripts, in her “shuffling.” Perhaps they were right, but the loss is a heavy one. Indeed, when any article or book appears that stresses significant change in O’Connor’s thought and craft over the years of her writing career—works such as Virginia Wray’s "Flannery O'Connor's Why Do the Heathen Rage? and the Quotidian 'Larger Things'" and, more recently, Colleen Warren’s “Seeing Potential in the Heathen: Flannery O’Connor’s Unfinished Novel”—it comes as a shock. Yet O’Connor’s writing is spotted with instances that highlight the idea of her development. In May of 1963, a little more than a year before her death, she writes in a letter to Sister Mariella Gable, “I’ve been writing eighteen years and I’ve reached the point where I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things that I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing” (Collected Works 1184). Beyond such a direct statement, one finds points where she writes in contradiction to some of her practice. In a letter to Betty Hester dated 19 May 1956, O’Connor writes of her depictions of African Americans: “I can only see them from the outside. I wouldn’t have the courage of Miss Shirley Ann Grau to go inside their heads” (Habit of Being 159). This letter follows one to Hester dated 8 December 1955 that again mentions Grau: “I have read two of the Grau stories—one about a small colored boy who steals a coat off a dead man and the other about the colored convict who goes home and his children throw bottles at him” (Collected Works 973). I repeat both of these passages because in 1945-46, O’Connor herself wrote a story that went inside the head of an African American character: “The Coat,” a tale concerning an African American woman, Rosa, who causes her husband’s death by a mob (“The Coat”). Though never included in her canonical works, this story was accepted for publication, according to Sally Fitzgerald, but left unpublished when the magazine wanted it without payment (Collected Works 1241). Clearly, there is a change in her thought about racial characters in a decade when race dominated American public life. Add to this the increasing sense of her independence from mentors such as Caroline Gordon (see her letter to Betty Hester, Collected Works 1138), and it seems clear that there is reason to search for the development in both the artist and her work. Most recently, the publication of O’Connor’s prayer journal makes plain that development was on her mind. In the very first entry, she writes, “I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside” (3). A few days later she adds of her writing, “Help me to get what is more than natural into my work—help me to love & bear with my work on that account” (18). In the penultimate entry, she writes, “O Lord, I am saying at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately…. If I am the one to wash the second step everyday, let me know it and let my heart overflow with love washing it” (38). Here, it seems, is a young woman wanting greatly to develop, wanting not to be static, wanting the mustard seed of her talent to blossom into a tree. The task that lies ahead for scholars is one of fully retracing this process, finding in her life “spent between the house and the chicken yard (Habit of Being 290-91) the various paths that O’Connor traveled and the signs of artistic development hidden there. I’m optimistic enough to believe that, once made visible, this growth will dwarf that from her thesis stories to the publication of A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. The discovery of A Prayer Journal and the O’Connor estate’s willingness to allow its publication point to how this discovery will be made. Anyone who has spent time in the O’Connor Collection at Georgia College has caught glimpses of the treasures there—nuggets of writing already known but currently withheld from public view. My own visit last summer to Emory University’s special collection and the O’Connor materials now deposited there suggests it, too, will be a valuable resource. But the work will begin with the hypothesis that a writer so interested in change, so committed to a Christian vision that relies on the possibility of human dynamism, was not a flat character in the story of her own life and her artistry. However one might opt to describe Flannery O’Connor, “flat” and “static” should not be among the options.

In September I attended a conference called the Unorthodox Orthodoxy at the University of Notre Dame in London. The topic was Catholicism and modernism, a key theme in the Catholic Church in the twentieth century. At the opening of the Second Vatican Council in October 1962—just two years before Flannery O’Connor’s death—Pope John XXIII highlighted the importance of the relationship between Catholicism and its contemporary context. He said that while “the Church should never depart from the sacred patrimony of truth received from the Fathers,” Catholics “must ever look to the present, to the new conditions and new forms of life introduced into the modern world.” In 1965 John’s successor Paul VI promulgated Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope”), the Council’s pronouncement on the Church and the modern world. By the end of Vatican II an institution grounded in Catholic medievalism and nineteenth-century absolutism would champion the sovereignty of individual conscience, argue for the necessity of religious freedom, honor the truth found in all great religious traditions, and give the Mass to Catholics in the vernacular, that is, their mother tongue. As a twentieth-century Roman Catholic, O’Connor lived through at least the beginning of the most significant reformation of Catholicism since Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517. The aftereffects of that first Reformation and Counter-Reformation have been felt for centuries, and likewise Catholics today continue to live in the wake of Vatican II and to argue about its scope, implications, and authority. This is, roughly speaking, the historical context of the Unorthodoxy Orthodoxy, ably organized by Jamie Callison of the University of Bergen and the University of Northampton. The majority of the papers presented at the conference focused on British writers, including prominent modernists and proto-modernists John Henry Newman, T.S. Eliot, and Graham Greene, as well as writers somewhat less known in the U.S. such as Ronald Firbank, David Jones, and Elizabeth Jennings, each of whom might usefully reframe readings of O’Connor as a Catholic modernist. The style of Ronald Firbank (1886-1926) might best be characterized as high camp in the Wildean mode. Firbank converted to Catholicism in 1907, and his novella Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, published posthumously in 1926, is certainly an unforgettable tour de force of style over substance. It is an unmistakable instance of late Catholic baroque. A letter written by O’Connor and dated 14 June 58 indicates that her friend Elizabeth Hester had been encouraging her to read some Firbank, but O’Connor resisted because she was avoiding distractions while composing what would become The Violent Bear It Away. However, by 1960 O’Connor was familiar with Firbank and even embraced an association with his work. A review by “Mr. Wm. Jay Smith” had situated O’Connor in an “eccentric tradition” featuring Firbank, as well as his fellow British writers Thomas Love Peacock Iris Murdoch. This categorization provided O’Connor with “a certain feeling of liberation,” and, she affirmed, “I’m all for the Eccentric Tradition” (letter to Hester, 27 Oct. 60). To what extent Firbank and O’Connor’s shared Catholic faith accounts for their eccentric world-view is a matter for further consideration. Certainly for both of them Catholic theology contributes powerfully to the idea of the grotesque. The Welsh artist David Jones (1895-1974) is best known for his drawings and his Eliotic epic poem In Parenthesis, first published in Britain in 1937 although not in the U.S. until 1961. I can find no evidence that O’Connor read any Jones, but the work of both authors reflects a common Catholic aesthetic sensibility, rooted in Jacques Maritain’s foundational Art and Scholasticism (1920). The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams makes exactly this case in his brilliant 2005 book Grace and Necessity. Just as an association with Firbank’s eccentricity was liberating for O’Connor so was her Catholic aesthetic vision. For Jones and O’Connor the Catholic writer is, in Williams’ words, “someone who cannot rule out any subject matter.” These Catholic modernists shared the view that belief does not diminish vision but adds to it a spiritual dimension. Finally, I was most struck during the Unorthodox Orthodoxy by the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001), introduced by Emma Mason, the editor of Jennings’ recently published Collected Poems. Unlike Firbank and Jones, but very much like O’Connor, Jennings was a Roman Catholic from birth. Her upbringing was old-fashioned and, it seems, somewhat terrifying. She spent her life in fear of God’s punishment, and she was mentally ill, alcoholic, and occasionally suicidal. What one first notices about her poems, in addition to their relatively conservative form, is the simplicity, directness, and purity of the faith that they express. Mason in her “Afterword” to the Collected Poems makes an argument for Jennings as a contemplative, even a mystic. The most common notable word in her work consists of one letter: “O.” This figure initiates prayer, evokes an open and breathing mouth, and signals a circular infinity. This vocable finds its way frequently into O’Connor in the fuller, and Americanized, version of “Oh.” “Oh no,” thinks the boy protagonist in the early story “The Turkey.” Ruby in “A Stroke of Good Fortune” repeats “Oh Lord” as she breathes heavily while climbing the stairs to her home. “Oh Gawd I’m lost! Oh hep me God I’m lost!” young Nelson prays in “Artificial.” “Oh Jesus Jesus,” “Oh my Lord,” and “Oh God,” various characters implore. Most famously Rubin Turpin, before she is assailed by Mary Grace, prays in “Revelation”: “Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!” The focus in all of these examples is on the body, on its breath, and on the characters’ relation with their Lord. These comic moments also represent pleas, often unconscious, for mystical encounter with divinity. I discovered in London last month that O’Connor shared many of the assumptions and aspirations of a number of British Catholic writers of the mid-twentieth century, including Firbank, Jones, and Jennings. Each maintained an orthodox faith, and all of them sought to place that faith in dialogue with the modern, violent, putatively godless world around them. Catholic writers were often at the forefront of this dialogue in their aesthetics, themes, and theology. Is it possible to remain orthodox in a time of iconoclasm and unorthodoxy without becoming an artifact of an era already superseded? Such questions provoked Catholic writers on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere as the Church moved toward what O’Connor called the “new synthesis,” and revolutionary moment, of Vatican Council II.

Like many of the readers of this blog, I am now more than a week home from the Flannery O’Connor and Other Southern Women Writers Conference, and only now find the resonances of the time spent in Milledgeville registering in a way I can reflect upon. One of the most memorable aspects of my time there in September was the presence of my partner of twenty years, Daryl Bem, who not only came along for the ride, but read almost all of The Complete Stories (I told him he could skip the early, thesis stories) as preparation. Daryl is one of the smartest people I have ever known, and his native intelligence was enhanced by an undergraduate degree in Physics from Reed College, where he studied in a Great Books general education program (reading far more of the major European writers than I have), and then graduate degrees in social psychology from Michigan. He reads voluminously, but rarely fiction. It was therefore a great sign of respect for me and for the enterprise of the people he would be encountering that he began to work his way through O’Connor’s stories—at age 77, he read his first, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Imagine encountering that story with more than seven decades of living under your belt! He is also one of the most open-minded people I have met. His move from physics to social psychology was the result of a graduate course he took at Harvard in the psychology of race relations under the great Thomas Pettigrew (he was initially a doctoral student in Physics at MIT on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, but MIT required its graduate students to have a minor and so Daryl decided to see what psychology was about). This was in the early 1960s, and the course with Pettigrew politicized and galvanized Daryl’s interests, and he has spent the last half a century studying why people believe what they do and how change occurs. He has also walked the walked: participating in Woolworth sit-ins as a graduate student in Michigan, testifying with his late wife Sandy in cases about sexism in the phone industry before the Supreme Court, and chairing our local Planned Parenthood chapter. In the last twenty years, he has been at the forefront of experimental work on psi, trying to prove its existence under laboratory conditions. As O’Connor was herself a social science major at Georgia College for Women and consistently depicted social scientists as nothing short of idiots and charlatans, Daryl took special pleasure in the ironies and fierceness of O’Connor’s fiction (I have not set him to read The Violent Bear It Away, with its most condemnatory depiction of a social scientist in the character Rayber). He also reminds me that most social psychologists begin, as does O’Connor, with trying to solve an issue of human existence that has been a source of trouble, pain, or suffering. Their methods differ, but their desire to make sense of what is often dark in life is shared. The story that seemed to stick most with Daryl the most—and not the one I might have predicted—was “The Displaced Person.” While Daryl was raised in Denver in a secular Jewish household, his own family was not one where the narratives of the Holocaust, its displaced persons, and the gas chamber had special meaning: his family had all emigrated to the United States long before that (his family were peddlers who followed the miners to Denver and founded the Samsonite luggage company). But something in O’Connor’s powerful depiction of the self-deluded Mrs. MacIntyre and of the optimism of Mr. Guizac, who sees no reason one of his fellow workers, a black man, should not marry his white cousin, clearly resonated, making the death of Mr. Guizac all the more poignant and tragic. When J. B. Potts presented his eloquent and articulate paper on “The Displaced Person” at the recent Conference, there was considerable discussion as to what degree of culpability the various players had in the accident that leads to Mr. Guizac’s death. Was the death the fault of Mrs. McIntyre, who had shown Guizac favor, planning to fire her farm hand, Mr. Shortley, and then changing her mind when it becomes clear to her that Mr. Guizac threatens her sense of racial (hence, social) order? Is it purely the fault of Mr. Shortley, who has fixed the tractor so it will disable Mr. Guizac (it is hard for me to imagine that Mr. Shortley was capable of contemplating actual murder, though who knows—“Revenge is mine, saith the Lord, he utters “softly”)? And what about the black characters in the story who have previously bonded in ways with Mr. Guizac, who does not carry the local racism of Mrs. McIntyre and the Shortleys in his heart? O’Connor’s narrator tips her hand, parsimoniously, but vividly. In filtering Mrs. McIntyre’s memory of the moment of impact of tractor and body, she recalls: “She had felt her eyes and Mr. Shortley’s eyes and the Negro’s eyes come together in one look that froze them in collusion forever” (234). In O’Connor’s customary fashion, she uses point of view to remind us she is giving us Mrs. McIntyre’s perception of that moment, recalled in the purgatory in which she will find herself, beyond the end of the story, as she replays these moments while the well-intentioned but feckless priest visits her weekly to “sit by the side of her bed and explain the doctrines of the church” (235). It is of signal importance that O’Connor does not even grant Mrs. McIntyre “a good death”: she, like a figure out of Dante’s Commedia, is stuck for eternity between spheres of existence—ethical, spiritual, and medical. When the question of culpability, blame, and agency arose in the discussion, Daryl and I whispered the well-known phrase “diffusion of responsibility” to each other. Daryl had made an educational film several decades ago (his leisure suit testifies to the time period!) called “When Will People Help?” The film was inspired by the controversial debates over the Kitty Genovese murder, in which a number of residents of her apartment complex as well as neighbors heard her cry for help, yet none came to her aid (we now have more details about the awful night and it is not as cut and dried a case of urban apathy as it was depicted as at the time). Social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane, in trying to account for why the thirty-eight witnesses did not come to her aid, devised what become known as the Bystander Apathy Eexperiment, whose design is too detailed for the purposes of this blog. The results demonstrated that when people witness distress or a person in trouble, they are much more likely to provide aid when they believe they are the only ones who can provide help or who know what is happening. When there are multiple people, what is called diffusion of responsibility kicks in—the sense that there are more people who might help, leading each individual to feel less responsible for assisting the person in distress. The tractor accident might be thought of as an example of the bystander effect in action. But, and here perhaps is where O’Connor’s distrust of social science may play a role, this psychological explanation does not address the ethical and spiritual dimensions of such apathy. It may explain the action; it does not exculpate Mrs. McIntyre, Mr. Shortley, or “the Negro” (as O’Connor refers to him in this section)—or, for that matter, the Priest, whose sincere pieties do not result in a better life for the Guizacs. Psychology can help us think through why people act the way they do; art enriches the larger questions of the meaning of the actions. Talking with Daryl about how we attribute motivations allows me to think of the complexities of the people O’Connor imagines into being; I think I can speak for Daryl in saying that O’Connor’s fiction adds to social science’s quest to help us as humans feel the moral and philosophical (and, I would add, spiritual) obligations and commitments we must strive to make with each other. The psychologist and the writer of fiction need not be at odds: in some important sense, O’Connor’s fiction is an application of Beliefs, Attitudes, and Human Affairs (Daryl’s first, landmark book) of the highest order. I’m glad to have both minds—and hearts-- in my life.

The Economics of Flannery O'Connor by Rhonda Armstrong

Several of Flannery O’Connor’s most celebrated short stories (“A Circle in the Fire,” “Good Country People,” “Greenleaf,” and “The Displaced Person,” to name only a few) feature widowed female farmers, and these farm women quite often express their concerns about the economy of farming. Readers may make a connection between those women farmers and O’Connor’s mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, who ran the farm known as Andalusia just outside of Milledgeville, Georgia. O’Connor and her mother lived on this farm for the last fifteen years of O’Connor’s life, during which period she wrote most of her short stories. In O’Connor’s letters and other documents, we can find evidence that the concerns expressed by those farm women in O’Connor’s stories were shared by her mother. The Habit of Being collects several letters that mention, in varying levels of detail, the financial and labor concerns of the farm. While O’Connor’s stories reveal some of the economic tensions of farming, those stories themselves were also an economic consideration. It is perhaps tempting to think of O’Connor as living a life devoted to art in some pure sense unsullied by questions of money, but she was of course a professional writer. Though her illness brought her back to Milledgeville to live on her mother’s farm, she brought her own income to the family budget. From early in her career, O’Connor paid attention to the money that writers make—or more often, don’t make. Her letters from Iowa, where she completed an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, make mention of the literary magazines that offer considerable prestige but very little pay. These are the magazines, she told her mother, in which she hoped to publish her own stories. When The Sewanee Review paid her well for a story, she expressed considerable surprise. Nonetheless, O’Connor recognized that those ill-paying literary magazines were the path to greater literary success—the kind that came with book sales and royalties. As she neared the end of her graduate program, O’Connor began applying for various jobs and fellowships. A fellowship that would allow her to continue writing full time was her preferred option, and she indicated that she was prepared to supplement from her own savings whatever paltry stipend might be attached. Having saved up gifts and bequests from relatives, O’Connor was fortunate to have the choice of taking a smaller fellowship, but even small fellowships were hard to come by. When one potential opportunity fell through, she seemed resigned to teaching university writing classes while trying to carve out time for her own work. Her letters home included queries about her bank balance, and she expressed concern that she would not have sufficient funds for a ticket home at the end of the year. The Rinehart award alleviated O’Connor’s worries about having hold down another job while she wrote. During her last semester at Iowa, Rinehart Publishers announced an award for a first novel from a promising Iowa Workshop student, which O’Connor won. It came with $750 as an advance, with an additional $750 upon acceptance of the final manuscript. This amount would be enough to support O’Connor for more than a year of work on Wise Blood. It was followed in 1952 by a Kenyon Review fellowship, providing further support and allowing O’Connor to continue writing full time. The letters collected at the beginning of A Habit of Being demonstrate O’Connor’s preoccupation with the economics of writings: finding an agent, getting stories published, negotiating contracts. After the publication of Wise Blood in 1952, O’Connor began publishing a steady stream of stories, and in 1953, her story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” was selected for an O. Henry Prize, the first of a string of prize-winning stories. That same story was optioned for a television production in 1956, and with the $800 she received, O’Connor purchased a Hotpoint refrigerator. She was sanguine about the deal, writing, “While they make hash out of my story, she (her mother, Regina) and me will make ice in the new refrigerator.” O’Connor continued to publish, and after Wise Blood, her books sold respectably well: her first short story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find, sold 4000 books in three printings. The publishing successes are followed by additional awards and prizes, including an $8000 Ford Foundation grant in 1959. Even after these successes, though, O’Connor continued to think about how writers make money. In 1960, she pitched a feature story on peacocks to a glossy travel magazine. The resulting essay, “King of the Birds,” fetched her $750, which was, she wrote, the most money she ever earned from a magazine. While we may think of O’Connor’s art as her vocation, it was also an occupation, an economic concern. Visiting Andalusia today, you can see not only the effects of the farm economy, but also that 1956 Hotpoint refrigerator, a physical reminder of the writerly economics of Flannery O’Connor.

Suppose we think of a scene in your novel as a scene in a play. Any scene in any play takes place on some sort of set. I feel that the sets in your play are quite wonderful but you never let us see them. A spotlight follows every move the characters make and throws an almost blinding radiance on them, but it is a little like the spotlight a burglar uses when he is cracking a safe; it illuminates a small circle and the rest of the stage is in darkness most of the time... It would be better, I think, if you occasionally used a spotlight large enough to illuminate the corners of the room, for those corners have gone on existing all through the most dramatic moments. –Caroline Gordon to Flannery O’Connor, May, 1951 (“A Master Class,” Georgia Review, 1979) After editing Habit of Being, Sally Fitzgerald planned—and never completed—a book titled A Master Class, a compilation of the extraordinary correspondence between Flannery O’Connor and literary mentor Caroline Gordon. Fitzgerald’s Habit of Being published only five of O’Connor’s letters to Gordon. Gordon is mentioned, however, in over 100 of the HOB letters. A Master Class would open with Caroline Gordon’s critique of Wise Blood, a nine-page, single-spaced letter written to O’Connor before her final draft was submitted to the publisher. In 1979, Fitzgerald published this nine-page letter alongside fragments of O’Connor’s grateful response in Georgia Review. Gordon’s comments—“really suggestions for your future work,” she tells O’Connor—accumulate into a dense catalog of writing instruction. Her letter is as generous as it is blunt. Nonetheless, it offers scrutiny that any serious writer would welcome. And that was just the beginning. While this correspondence continued until O’Connor’s 1964 death, only nine letters between the two women have since been published. What survives of this correspondence? For the past year, I’ve trailed Fitzgerald’s steps and uncovered new material, transcribing well over 60,000 words. I have identified what I call “shadow” letters: lost correspondence whose contents may be reconstructed by orbital events and conversations. For me, these letters have a value beyond simply showcasing the two vibrant personalities and their relationship. Watching Gordon—an expert craftswoman, generous teacher, and deeply active convert to Catholicism—teach O’Connor (who becomes an expert craftswoman and teacher) has changed the path and content of my writing. What’s next? I talked about my research at this past weekend's conference (Flannery O’Connor and Other Southern Women Writers (9/17-20 at GCSU) and will be presenting it again at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (Philadelphia, Nov. 3-5). The O’Connor community, you see, is my Caroline Gordon: generous, blunt, and supportive in ways that transcend the material in front of us. “All these comments on writing… have helped along my education considerably and I am certainly obliged to you,” O’Connor wrote to Gordon. I might well say the same. Christine Flanagan, MFA, is an Associate Professor of English at University of the Sciences who attended the 2014 NEH Summer Institute, “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor” at Georgia College and State University.

We at The Flannery O'Connor Society are pleased to inaugurate our new blog site with this wonderful essay by Monica Miller, who is the Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the same institution and was a participant in the 2014 NEH Seminar, "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor." We welcome your responses to this blog entry.

Anyone who would like to contribute his or her own blog entry to the site is welcome to send the entry to clwarren@taylor.edu.

Recently, someone asked me what stories I would recommend for someone who wants to start reading Flannery O’Connor. Not surprisingly, I suggested that they get a copy of A Good Man Is Hard To Find and work through it. It was my first experience of O’Connor’s work: after reading a couple of her short stories in an undergraduate literature class, I got a copy of the collection out of the library and read it in one sitting. I had one of those bibliophile moments, looking up after a couple of hours at my little table in the coffeehouse, cappuccino cold, ashtray full of cigarettes (I know, but I was nineteen; it was decades ago)—one of those moments where my world had been irrevocably changed, and I couldn’t understand how everyone else in the café was continuing to go on about their lives, chatting about Proust or Melrose Place. Years later, I now teach those stories to today’s nineteen year olds. To be fair, not everyone in my classes forges such an immediate connection as I did. Many of my students come to class confused about what happened—“Wait, why did he steal her leg?”—or even upset by their own reactions. One young man even came to my office hours once, worried that something was wrong with him because he found the stories funny. “But then he said that the grandmother would have been a nice lady if she’d had someone to shoot her every day, and I laughed! That was just awful of me!” However, in every class, there are always a couple of students—usually young women—who, like I did, fall headlong into O’Connor’s stories only to emerge out the other side, their worlds changed, their friends not understanding. Especially now that I teach at a tech school, the young women I teach often see themselves in O’Connor’s impatient, intellectual characters such as Joy-Hulga and Mary Grace. My students do not read O’Connor as scholars such as Tara Powell does, who sees O’Connor as enacting anti-intellectual themes. My students do not read O’Connor as portraying intellectuals with “amusement, caution, suspicion, ridicule, and even disdain as they each come to grief in rural Georgia on the horns of O’Connor’s pen” (Powell 26). Instead, my students are more like author Amy Weldon, who characterizes herself as one of O’Connor’ s “odd girls,” whose “mother looks on your lumpy body, your nose in that book, your loping walk (why do you always have to stride like a field hand?) and sighs” (70). Unlike Weldon, however, I don’t think my students necessarily identify quite in the same way as “odd girls.” Nor do they see Joy-Hulga and Mary Grace as being primarily objects of amusement or suspicion. Instead, my students identify rather directly with these irritated young women, and sympathize with these impatient, self-identified intellectuals. I can certainly imagine them expressing similar sentiments to those that O’Connor once wrote to her friend Betty Hester: “…[T]he only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.” As female students at a primarily male tech school, these young women tell me that they feel even more pressure than most at this demanding school to succeed, and they are desperate to find role models as they figure out what personae will best help them make it through. Although many look to contemporary characters such as Hermione and Katniss as heroines to emulate, I’m fascinated to watch them latch onto O’Connor’s much more flawed characters, as well. To be fair, I, too, enjoy living vicariously through these curmudgeonly characters; there are plenty of people I would enjoy throwing a heavy book at while calling them an old wart hog, as Mary Grace does. However, the young women in my classes feel this vicarious thrill even more strongly than I do, as many of them do lug such enormous books around with them, using them as a shield against the Mrs. Turpins in their worlds, authority figures who actively disdain non-feminine pursuits such as engineering. Such giant books also function as a promise to themselves, a map to the kind of intellectual futures they’re only beginning to be able to imagine. I admit, it may seem strange to hold up any of O’Connor’s characters as role models. But while a primary challenge in the classroom is to encourage students to develop critical distance from their readings, to develop analytical skills separate from their emotional responses to literature, I am committed to retaining at least some of this emotional response in the classroom, if only so that students remember that reading should ultimately remain a source for pleasure, even as they learn more complex ways of reading. And just as O’Connor’s stories don’t end at Mary Grace’s name-calling or Joy-Hulga’s condescension, neither do I allow my students to stop with their vicarious delight in these scenes. Instead, they push through, not only to the ends of the stories, but to more complex analyses of the texts. What do we make of the Holocaust imagery in “Revelation”? What about the other daughters in “Good Country People”? Nevertheless, I do encourage them to not completely let go of their first responses to the stories. I want them to keep reading, to continue to enjoy the pleasures of the text. And I want them to feel okay about identifying with flawed characters, with angry, irritated young women. Young men have had plenty of Holden Caulfields; young women need to know that they have Mary Grace, as well. Works Cited O’Connor, Flannery. Letter to Betty Hester. 28 June 1956. Essays and Letters. New York: Library of America, 1988. Powell, Tara. The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2012. Welden, Amy. “The Odd Girls: Flannery O’Connor and Me.” Shenandoah 60:1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 68-80.